Re-examining Consent in an Age of Datapolitik and Neoconfederate Posturing

• In Event: Autonomy and Consent after ‘Roe’ and #MeToo

Abstract

Responding to the ‘Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization’ case which overturned ‘Roe v. Wade’ in June 2022, health policy experts Bridget G. Kelly and Maniza Habib took to assessing period-tracking applications (apps) that up to that time were perceived as positive tools for health literacy, menstrual demystification, and bodily awareness. Their assessment rose from a growing call on social media for people with uteri to delete their period trackers. Of course information security scholars like Anton Dahbura at Johns Hopkins and political theorist Davide Panagia at UCLA have indicated that opting out of digital mechanisms is not a guarantee for freedom through or beyond privacy. American political science literature will likely analyze the post-Roe political landscape through institutional vectors like the growing ballot initiatives to protect abortion care, fast-tracked cases to the Supreme Court featuring patients turned away by doctors in states with strict abortion bans despite life-threatening medical complications, and the introduction of a Congressional bill to protect access to medication abortion (i.e. abortion pill). This paper, however, returns to the early scholarship on Lockean consent by the recently departed Dr. Kirstie McClure (1996) and puts it into conversation with McClure’s more recent exploration of lying and politics through the vector of the neoconfederate posturing of presidential hopeful Nikki Haley. Preliminary analysis shows that the ‘Dobbs v. Jackson’ case serves to solidify a neofeudalist shift in U.S. racial capitalism.

Author

• Jasmine Noelle Yarish, University of the District of Columbia